Stehendes Modell

In 1886 Seurat showed his enormous Sunday on the Grande Jatte, and the critics went after the figures, calling them stiff, mechanical, the strollers turned to cardboard cut-outs by all those little dots. His answer was to paint the opposite: warm, unposed nudes in his own studio, three young women undressing between sittings. This little panel, barely bigger than a hand, is his working study for the standing figure on the right. He built even a quick sketch the same painstaking way, dabs of pure colour set side by side so the eye does the mixing. In the finished picture, on the wall behind the women, hangs the Grande Jatte itself, the very painting the reviewers had mocked, its park crowd frozen there while real bodies stand in front of it. The signed, more finished version of this pose went to Felix Feneon, the critic who was among the few to defend him.